The second most significant candidate event in the observation period (referred to as LVT151012) was reported on October 12, 2015 at 09:54:43 UTC with a combined matched filter SNR of 9:6. The search reported a false alarm rate of 1 per 2.3 years and a corresponding false alarm probability of 0.02 for this candidate event. Detector characterization studies have not identified an instrumental or environmental artifact as causing this candidate event. However, its false alarm probability is not sufficiently low to confidently claim this candidate event as a signal. Detailed waveform analysis of this candidate event indicates that it is also a binary black hole merger with source frame masses 23 MSun and 13 MSun, if it is of astrophysical origin.

Now that a second black hole merger have been detected with high confidence. The idea that such events might be common have surfaced and made some think in radically new lines to explain how such events might happen quite often.One hypothesis is that black holes and stars in the central part of globular clusters might collect in a 'Mosh pit' - I have a hunch that one of the team must be a metalhead for that expression to be used - indeed is a good term to describe the chaotic conditions and collisions that can occur in such a volume of space where stars and black holes are comparably tightly packed together. Northwestern univ summary, video and link to the actual paper.

The neutron star merger is actually bigger news than the black hole mergers, as it just provided the explanation for how half the elements on the periodic table are created, and provided absolute confirmation of how some gamma ray bursts are generated, while establishing with certainty that the speed of gravity and the speed of light are equal. Wow! That's a lot of science from one event!

I'm eager to see more neutron star mergers to provide information on the base rates of such events. And incidentally, I might be able to photograph one of these in the northern skies someday.

Incredible find! I was under the impression that supernovas also create the elements heavier than iron. Is that origin theory still possible, or is it a mix of both?

A supernova should indeed produce some heavy elements if the theory is correct for them.

If I have understood this right, and I'm no physicist, the amounts of elements heavier than iron don't quite add up if only supernova explosions were the source.For example the amount of the most heavy elements would be very small. Lets say the mass of Luna, our moon from one supernova.When two neutron stars collide, they spew out 100 if not 1000's of times more material. The part from the surface of the neutron star would be iron and elements from that medium heavy part of the periodic table, the other material will be neutronium.Soon ˝ of the neutrons decay to protons capture electrons and create gold, uranium and the very heavy, and briefly existing, elements on row 7 of the periodic table.

The neutron star merger is actually bigger news than the black hole mergers

A bit of an apples and oranges thing, perhaps. The BH mergers were extremely cool since we had direct observations of the "strong-field" regime of gravity, where the spacetime undergoes order-unity convolutions. That's many many many orders of magnitude stronger than anything we'd seen before, and Einstein's general relativity (GR) passed with flying colours.

The equality of electromagnetic and gravitational wave speeds is extremely cool, too. It's meant that many large classes of models for dark energy or modified gravity (extensions of GR) have been ruled out overnight.

It is amazing that a lid was successfully placed on the news and the findings were successfully announcement at one time. An article in Science stated that the huge teams of physicists were unprepared for the chaos of astronomers in small competing groups---but they came together on one giant paper submitted to The Astrophysical Letters with 4600 authors--one third of the astronomy community. Wow, talk of big science.

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